Effectiveness of Using Guided Peer Code Review to Support Learning of Programming Concepts in a CS2 Course: A Pilot Study
Tamaike Brown, Gursimran Walia, Alex Radermacher, Maninder Singh, Mourya Reddy Narasareddygari · 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings · 2020
Effectiveness of Using Guided Peer Code Review to Support Learning of Programming Concepts in CS2 Course: A Pilot Studyretention or sharing among students.To accomplish this, guided PCR sessions were conducted where students were asked to follow a provided checklist in order to systematically check for programming errors when reading source code on line-to-line basis. Research methodology:We designed and implemented four different PCR sessions over the course of four weeks in one CS2 classroom.During each week, students were given a piece of code covering a specific data structure and were asked to review and find errors in the code.The provided code pieces were seeded with five categories of errors: initialization/declaration, method call/ definition, array/linkedList/trees/, output and flow of control.We analyzed data gathered from the guided PCR sessions, reflection sessions conducted after each PCR session, work conducted by students (assignments, quizzes, and exams completed as part of the course), and a feedback survey conducted at the end of study.Contribution: This paper provides empirical evidence of the impact the guided PCR had on CS2 students' understanding of programming concepts.While prior research has examined the effects of PCR on students' motivation to learn and course attendance, it lacks evidence concerning the usefulness of guided PCR at improving students' conceptual knowledge in their courses.We also provide evidence on how PCR can be used to enable knowledge sharing among students and foster in-class discussion.We also hope that this study will lead to the development of a more robust error checklist and a larger repository of programs that are seeded with realistic defects and can be used by other CS1/CS2 instructors.Outline: The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2, looks at related work.Section 3 presents the experimental design implementation details used by the authors of this paper.Following this, the data collection and analysis of the results are presented in Section 4. Section 5 contains a discussion of the results.Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper.